"How are you, mom?"
"I got bitten by a rat."
"What??"
"There was a family of rats in the basement but the cats chased them out, and now they moved to the attic. They ate a hole in the ceiling and one of them fell through and dropped to the floor. I didn't see it but I heard it. Terrible squealing."
"Good God..."
Read MoreI don't like math, but I do...sometimes. Sometimes it lets you see amazing things.
I'm obsessed with improving my writing. I'm hellbent on getting so good, my words will make your teeth sing. I want to be so superb, no one will be able to put my books. No one. This is my goal. To take over the world. And so I'm grinding away at it every day, trying to maximize the time I spend on my work, because the more time I spend on it, the better I will get. I have seen a direct correlation to this. Remember I told you about spending 2 hours every morning on learning new words with the help of etymology? Well, that time shrunk to 1 hour, and the file shrunk to half its size! It's working! I'm getting better and faster!
I'm also trying to maximize my reading time, so I decided to calculate what I do every day to see where my time goes. I figure a typical life gets spent like this:
Read MoreI keep writing posts about writing, but reading is a huge part of writing, and something hit me yesterday as I started reading THE STAND by Stephen King. There are books that inspire you to write, period. This is not to say that there are books that don't inspire you to write for some reason. Every single book you read, whether you like it or not, is a learning experience. You can always pick up things, like how to write, or how not to write, and both are valuable. But there is something about some of them that speaks to you as a writer on a completely different level, and that is why we keep coming back to those authors again, and again, and again. They hold our hand and tell us it's okay to write, in fact, they say, yes, you can. Stephen King is one of those authors for me. It doesn't matter what I read by him, I get giddy like a little girl and I can't actually read him without interruptions because I want to jump up every 5 minutes and check my current manuscript, Oh, how did he say this thing again? And how did I say this thing? Oh, I can say this thing like this? Oh, I didn't know I can! And so on. After only writing (and reading) full time for a little less than 2 years, I now firmly believe that to be a successful writer, and by successful I mean to have a readership large enough to sustain you as a writer financially, you have to read only those kinds of books, until you develop enough of a stamina and belief in yourself to know who you are. I'm nowhere near that point, I'm very green. In a sense, I consider myself as a 2 year old (as a writer) and as a 16 year old (as an American writer) because I started learning English 16 years ago when I came to US from Russia, and I have a long way ahead of me to master the language. But let's pull this phenomenon apart and see what is it that makes you want to write, that magic stuff that you read in those special books.
Read MoreI feel like I've been gutted, learning about Philip Seymour Hoffman's death a couple hours ago, and all this time I was wondering. Why? Why am I feeling this way? Why do I want to cry, why do my arms and legs feel numb, I didn't even know him personally, I've seen only a few films he was in, I'm not a hardcore fan, then why? And I think I know the answer. He was unhappy. That's what hit me, this realization that he simply wasn't happy. He took drugs. Why do we take drugs? To dull the pain, to escape. Some people get drunk, some do drugs, some decide to really make it quits and commit suicide, drugs is just an easier path to it, riddled with cosmic images of some super-neon galaxy that's fantastic and beautiful and whatever, of maybe riddled with fantastic monsters, I don't know. Either way, it dulls the pain. I never took drugs, never became an alcoholic, don't know how I avoided it, because I wanted to take my life, wanted to do it so bad that I walked around with 100 very strong sleeping pills and a couple times snuck into the kitchen in the middle of the night and contemplated to cut my pain out, like, literally, I wanted to get rid of it by cutting myself open. It was in one of those delirious states that I thought of my kids and that made me stop, wake up, decide to live. Of course, who am I to contemplate how happy Phil Hoffman was, who am I to know, but I can't help it but to feel. Why else would you get drugged up to your eyeballs? Why would you overdose? Because you want more, more and more, because you can't stop, because the pain is just too great and conventional methods are not working anymore.
Read MoreOne of my readers, Caitlin Plavala, asked me this: "Have you already made a blog post about getting hit by that truck? Because I have some questions. Like a wake up call for suicidal people like me who think getting hit by a truck sounds nice. Gory details of pain, idk. I think there is a misconception that getting seriously injured will solve all of our problems." And I will oblige by telling this little story here, the one I touched upon in another blog post, a while ago, on quitting your job to write full time. I only mentioned it as one simple line, but it wasn't simple, it was life changing, perhaps, perhaps eye opening, or perhaps it was life's kick in my ass, to make me finally do what I wanted to do.
It all happened on a dark clear December evening, three years ago, on some day after Christmas but before New Years...
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